Books & Reports

Featured Report

Putting Transit to Work in Main Street America

Reconnecting America and the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) examine how smaller communities and rural regions are using transit and other mobility investments to revitalize their economies and connect residents to local and regional opportunities.

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development today released the Transit-Oriented Development Strategic Plan created for the Metro TOD Program in Portland, Oregon. In conjunction with the release, CTOD published a web page providing guidance on how the plan contents can be nationally applied.

Metropolitan Planning Organizations play a very important role in the planning and implementation of TOD. As regional planning bodies, MPOs are in a unique position to support stakeholders within their jurisdiction to take actions or adopt policies that support transit-oriented development and provide funding for planning and transit supportive infrastructure. In long-standing federal law for MPOs, the goals of a typical regional TOD strategic plan dovetail with the goals that metropolitan planning organizations of all sizes must strive to meet with their planning efforts. TOD is more successful if both public and private investments are planned as part of a regional transit or TOD strategy. This improves the efficiency and the cost-effectiveness of transportation investments and yields more value to more people. Because MPOs play a primary role in identifying priority projects for federal transportation funding, they are uniquely set-up to support region-wide planning efforts, and…

"Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions" is described as a step-by-step action plan guidebook for making communities resilient, resourceful, and healthy. The book by Stephen J. Coyle includes work contributed by Sam Zimbabwe, director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development.

A growing body of research shows that strategies to develop more sustainable communities can boost regional economic growth by reducing state and municipal spending, attracting businesses and jobs and helping families with household budgets. Adopting such strategies could help communities:

Executive Summary
This report documents real estate development patterns along three recently constructed light rail transit lines in the United States. This topic is important for local planning practitioners, transit agencies, community members and other stakeholders in their efforts to plan for new transit investments and foster transit-oriented development (TOD). Setting realistic expectations about the scale, timing and location of private investment along new transit lines is especially critical where new development is expected to help pay for needed transit improvements, neighborhood amenities, or other community benefits.
The three transit lines examined in this report are the Hiawatha Line in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, the Southeast Corridor in the Denver region, and the Blue Line in the Charlotte region. The report examines residential and commercial development that occurred within a half-mile of stations along the three lines. Development is evaluated…

The second edition of "Streetcars and Cities in the 21st Century," our popular award-winning book on how to plan, finance and build streetcar systems contains an update on the status of the U.S. streetcar movement and case studies of new streetcars in Seattle and Savannah. There's a foreword by U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, chair of the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, and updated contact info for every streetcar project planned or underway in the U.S. This richly illustrated book is intended to promote a learning network among the cities and transit agencies that are interested in building new systems, with or without federal funding.

Today the Center for Transit-Oriented Development released its "Performance-Based Transit-Oriented Development Typology Guidebook,” a hands-on tool for identifying the different conditions that exist around transit stations and determining how that influences performance on a range of metrics.